Legal Theorists Recognized for Scholarship

Professors Frederick Schauer and Rachel Bayefsky of the University of Virginia School of Law are being recognized by the Association of American Law Schools for their scholarship in legal theory.

Schauer won the Hart-Dworkin Award in Legal Philosophy, given annually to a scholar who has made significant and lasting contributions to the philosophical understanding of law, according to the AALS.

Schauer is a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at UVA, and he is among the most recognizable names in the legal academy. His expertise has been demonstrated in hundreds of books, book chapters, articles, essays, classes and personal appearances. Schauer is a world-renowned expert in the areas of constitutional law, evidence, legal reasoning, freedom of speech, and jurisprudence and the philosophy of law.

In 2020, Schauer was elected a corresponding fellow of the British Academy in recognition of his distinguished contributions to academic thought. He received an honorary doctorate from the Vienna University of Economics and Business in 2019. Among his other accolades, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has been chair of the Section on Constitutional Law of the AALS and of the Committee on Philosophy and Law of the American Philosophical Association.

From 1990 to 2008, he was Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard University, from which he earned his J.D. in 1972, and was previously professor of law at the University of Michigan.

Bayefsky won Best Untenured Article on Federal Jurisdiction for her paper “Remedies and Respect: Rethinking the Role of Federal Judicial Relief,” published in the Georgetown Law Journal. She argues that “a remedy that takes effect by expressing respect for the party whose rights were violated is a constitutionally legitimate, normatively desirable, and practically feasible exercise of federal judicial authority.”

Bayefsky, who joined the faculty in the fall, writes about constitutional law, federal courts, civil procedure and legal theory. Her work addresses both the practical workings of legal institutions and underlying philosophical ideas such as dignity and equality.

Bayefsky clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She also taught at Harvard Law School as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law, and worked as a litigator at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.

She earned her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, and her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

The awards, announced Wednesday, will be presented in January during the virtual AALS Annual Meeting.